RoboCup project Christine

About the RoboCup competition

The first RoboCup competition was held at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 1997 and has been a yearly (very popular) event ever since. Basically the idea is to construct a vehicle that can find its own way around a track, which (to some extent) is marked with black adhesive tape. Each time the vehicle passes a gate, a point is gained. Certain obstacles like opening doors, finding gates without a line, going down stairs, avoiding blinking gates, finding randomly placed balls, surviving a guillotine gate, etc., must also be overcome.
Building a robot involves a lot of interdisciplinary work, as subjects like mechanical construction, analog and digital electronics, steering, image processing, and data processing are involved.
You can find more about the RoboCup competition including a complete description of the track at http://www.robocup.dtu.dk (In Danish). The new track is usually disclosed three months prior to the competition, giving the teams a chance to modify their robot and set up some of the programming in advance.

About the robot

Our robot is named after a '58 Plymouth Fury from the novel, Christine, of Stephen King. In the novel a young lad gets obsessed by the old car, and spends all his time restoring it. Later it turns out that the car has a will of it's own...
This has on several occasions turned out to be a rather fitting description of our robot.
A description of the construction can be found on the technical page and the process is documented in the gallery section.

About us

We are both former students at DTU and have participated in RoboCup since 2004. Torsten has a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and recently finished his Ph.D. "Analysis of distribution systems with a high penetration of distributed generation". Nana has a M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering and also recently finished her Ph.D. "Nanoscale modification of copper for novel methanol and water-gas shift catalysts" at Department of Physics. We are currently living in Fredericia and working at Energinet.dk and Vattenfall A/S. Apart from robot building our interests include motorbikes, running, and music.